The present invention relates generally to document publication and, more particularly, to a method and system for publishing electronic media, such as a document to a document management system in a number of publishing formats independent of the document creation application.
It is generally well known that when software applications seek to print electronic media, the software applications or programs temporarily route control of the electronic document to a printing program commonly referred to as a “printer driver.” When the programs route control to the printer driver, actual content of the electronic document or a representation of that document is available for printing to one of a number of system printers and other output devices. Once the printer driver has control of and/or access to the actual content of the electronic document or a representation thereof, the printer driver may perform a single printing or other outputting function. Further, regardless of which document creation application from which a user seeks to print, the same common screens or windows are displayed by the printer driver. Typically, the printer driver screens enable a user to select a particular system printer or other output device, and sometimes select output parameters. That is, the user may select a print range including a particular page, range of pages, or highlighted selection as well as identify a number of copies to print and select a collation option. Despite access to the content of the electronic document, known printer drivers or printing applications are unable to manipulate the content of the electronic document to service additional needs of the document creator and/or user.
Often a user desires to convert an electronic document from its native format to another format so that the content of the electronic document may be accessed more effectively and efficiently by another user. For example, a document may be created in English using a word processing application. The user, however, may desire that the content of the electronic document be available to another user who cannot effectively view the content of the electronic document because he or she uses a word processing application that is foreign to the format in which the electronic document was created. That is, the electronic document may have been originally created using a PC-based word processing application, but another individual seeking access to the content of the original electronic document may be unable to access the content since he or she uses a non-PC-based word processing application. Currently, some users attempt to circumvent this problem by converting the original electronic document into another document format, such as a portable document format (PDF). To convert the original electronic document to a PDF file, it is incumbent upon the user to initialize a second and independent application that is capable of completing the desired conversion and publication.
Accessing a second and independent application to achieve the user's goal, i.e., make the content of an electronic document available in a non-native format, often requires additional software that must be purchased to generate these additional file formats. Purchasing of additional software programs can be expensive and delay productivity for organizations and businesses with multiple users. Additionally, some organizations and businesses seek to alleviate the costs associated with purchasing multiple software programs by modifying the native document creation software applications. Manipulation of the original software application may be undesirable as such a step may constitute a breach of a licensing agreement with the software providers.
Also well known is the use of document management systems (DMS) to help manage the transfer of electronic information and actual document content between distributed authors/users. DMS's are becoming increasingly popular by businesses and organizations to maintain the systematic and organized storing of data on a shared database or server. DMS's enable users to effectively store as well as retrieve documents without, oftentimes, requiring the user to know the precise location where the electronic document is stored and/or to be retrieved from. Furthermore, DMS's allow a user to assign a number of identification criteria so that a document may be readily identified during a document search.
Since DMS's are quite commonplace in a large user environment, current integrated solutions to facilitate the adding of data files to the DMS in various document formats also require modifications to the native software application used to author the electronic document. These integrated solutions to DMS's include the adding of a button or menu option to the authoring application to perform the desired conversion function. For example, to convert a document to a portable document format, a button or menu option to facilitate the conversion of the electronic document to a PDF format is added to the native software application. Again, however, manipulating the software applications to include additional buttons or menu options to facilitate conversion of the content of an electronic document to a non-native format requires maintaining an abundance of software applications that, in most circumstances, is cost prohibitive.
It would therefore be desirable to design a printer driver for publishing electronic media to a document management system in a number of publishing formats without requiring a user to activate a non-native document creation application. It would further be desirable to construct a computer program that may publish electronic media in a number of media formats and may be implemented with a number of media creation applications capable of printing electronic media.